An interesting weekend

A couple days late, but I wanted to throw in some of the things that we worked on over the weekend. Emma and Soren showed me how the cuisennaire rods work, and I got to go through their workbooks and some teaching materials.

We went back to the glassblowing demonstration because Emma wanted to check it out. Emma was interested in how glass becomes liquid at high temperatures, and we talked a little about liquids and solids. Soren was a bit bored the second time around.

I was absolutely amazed at how much math work Soren has done. Wow. We sat down and did a couple of pages, and I noticed that she was using her fingers a lot for addition and subtraction when one of the numbers was over five. At one point, she said, "I don't have fifteen fingers!" I drew a number line for her, and we talked about how you can add by hopping to the right, or subtract by hopping to the left. The idea was to give her a way of learning to count forward or backward using "beats" (It's hard to explain verbally, but say I'm calculating 7 - 3. I can start with 7 and think "da, da, da" while I'm counting count back "6,5,4" in my head, so I don't have to think "6,5,4" and "1,2,3" at the same time. I know the "rhythm" of 3. I hope that makes sense! Emma understood it right away). In figuring out the number line, we ended up doing longer problems like 3 + 5 - 2 + 4 - 3. Soren felt proud of herself for mastering "long" problems. At the end of the workbook section, Soren was supposed to make up her own problems. She kept coming up with things like 3 - 5, for which the answers were negative numbers. I showed her how that worked on the number line (just continuing to the left and putting a "minus" by the number). She grasped it pretty well - I hope it wasn't the wrong thing to do. She was really proud and wrote Emma a note that said "Daddy taught me that there are numbers under 0 and they are -1, -2, -3, -4 and more." We also played a game of making number sentences out of cards that Soren drew and cut out. This was her idea, and we had fun doing it (we turned equal signs into elevens and sixes into nines by turning the cards).

One thing I forgot to mention to you, Kelly, is that Soren seemed a little confused about reading a problem like 5 = 7 - 2, where the "answer" is on the left. She'd sometimes read it as "2 minus 7 equals 5," and when I corrected her, she got a little miffed and said, "Mommy told me to read it from right to left!" I think she may have misunderstood what you'd told her. She didn't try to subtract 7 from 2, though, so she obviously understood the math problem itself.

Emma spent a lot of time reading "Horrible Histories - The Measly Middle Ages" which I had sitting around from a book sale. She read to herself mostly, but would read me a passage from time to time that she found particularly interesting. She liked the cartoons, though a lot of the captions were wordplays on idioms she didn't know (frustrating to try to explain!). Life in the middle ages was an eye opener for her!

Emma and I got to do some math too. There was a section where they showed 4 numbers in a 2X2 grid, and then showed a pattern - a square with, say the top right and bottom left corners marked, to show they wanted the sum of the corresponding numbers from the grid. She had no trouble with this once we figured out the visual representation (I had to go to the answer book to figure it out!). It was interesting to me, that she'd use pieces of information she already knew to solve new problems. For example, if she'd already done the top left/bottom right sum, and was asked for the top left/bottom right/top right sum, she'd use the sum she already had, and just add in the top right. A lot of this is hard to describe! Very visual. There were some addition problems to work on carrying. The way they did it in the workbook was a little strange. They put grey blocks under the sum, to allow the child to do one part of the sum at a time, then combine to get the answer. I think it was meant to be an intermediate step on the way to understanding the carry, but it was just confusing to Emma, and we ended up just putting the carried "1" above the next number to the left and adding it in. Emma was impressed when she hit a problem that required two carries. So was I. We also did the quick "trick" of adding 9 by adding 10 and subtracting 1 (same trick for eight). She got this immediately, and I'm almost sure she uses similar tricks in her head to hold information while doing a multi-part problem (she talks to herself, like I do).

On sunday, we took apart an old computer I had and learned what all the parts were, and what they do. They were fascinated by circuit boards, and compared them with little villages with roads and houses. I went with it, and talked about electricity traveling the roads and visiting the houses. We took apart the hard drive (a big old 5.25" behemoth) and looked inside. I extracted a metal platter for each of them. Very shiny!

Okay. Sorry to go on for so long, but I was very excited by what they're doing!